This is your brain on stress

Need an excuse to take it easy this weekend? Here’s one: Stress is making your brain smaller.

That’s according to a Yale University study published in January where 103 study participants underwent health tests and then took “cumulative adversity interviews” where researchers estimated how much stress each test subject dealt with.

The researchers did MRI scans to find the more stressed subjects had less gray matter in their prefrontal cortexes, which researchers said can impair the body’s ability to deal with further stress.

So how should we react to this study’s findings? Well, I’m not a neuroscientist, but I think a good initial reaction would be to go ahead and sleep in tomorrow.